Be Salt and Light for the World! – Sunday Homily

Just Another Priest Podcast, by Fr. Kyle Schnippel

Over the last several months, maybe a bit more than a year, now, I have developed a bit of a reputation for baking. Perhaps I should put more on Instagram than just pictures of food, but what would be the fun in that?

When I first started making my own bread, one of the key ingredients fascinated me: salt. Sure, I was expecting it, salt seems to go in everything, but the reason ‘Why’ was the interesting part: it was required to help provide a favorable environment for the yeast to do its job of turning the sugars in the flour into the gases that help bread rise. Salt also helps gluten form in bread, gives it a richer flavor, etc. Even just a little bit is required to make the whole project work.

And it isn’t just bread, either. Cooking without salt leads to bland and flat food. If you watch any cooking competition show on tv (guilty as charged!), one of the major complaints is that it wasn’t seasoned enough with salt; the food is flat. You see, salt allows all the other flavors that a chef has worked so hard to impart into the food to come out and blossom.

And if it fails to do that, if salt becomes stale and tasteless; it not only deserves to be thrown out and trampled, but the Greek that Jesus uses here has a connotation of being foolish. It does not achieve the end set for itself, and is just worthless.

Now, when we turn and look at this passage from Matthew, it is important to remember what we just heard. Last week, we had the Beatitudes, and we are still very early in our march through the Sermon on the Mount (which lasts through Chapter seven of Matthew’s account of the Gospel). By including these similes early in the Sermon and immediately after the Beatitudes, Jesus is not so subtly reminding us that if we do not put those teachings into action, we are worth nothing more than being tossed out and trampled. We are nothing more than fools, and not in a good way!

That is the same problem that is being addressed in today’s First Reading from Isaiah, too. If you look just prior to what was proclaimed today, the people of Israel are lamenting that they have fasted, they have prayed, they have dutifully gone to the Temple for worship, yet Jerusalem is still going to be destroyed by Babylonians as they march toward the city.

God responds in verse six, leading in to the reading: ‘This is the fast that I choose: release those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke, free the oppressed, break every yoke; (and from there it picks up with the reading: ‘share your bread, welcome the homeless, cloth the naked, etc.’

It isn’t a question of pray and worship OR do these things; it is a question of ‘If you pray and worship, that should lead you into these things!’ (The Letter of St. James comes to the fore: ‘If you show me your faith without works, I will show you the faith that underlies my works!’

And I return to that image of baking bread, and Jesus calling us to be salt and leaven, yeast, for society. The basic recipe for bread that I use is six and a half cups of flour and three cups of water. (Makes a lot of bread!)

To that volume of dough, I add just one tablespoon of salt, one tablespoon of yeast. And all that flour and water is transformed into something more, lighter, airier, tastier, etc.

As Catholics, that is what we are called to do in society. We can’t just be about what we do here, but what we do here is to enliven and inform and drive us to what we do out there, out there in the world! The world should be a better place because we are in it! The world should be more aware of the needs of the unborn, the hungry, the homeless, the refugee, the naked; because we can identify with them all and our task in the world is to give a voice to those who have no voice.

And it should all be driven by our faith, our prayer, our worship here in this place.

You are salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.

You!

Be this! Today!!!

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